Economy, opportunity seen leading to $599 Apple netbook — Faced with the perfect storm of a bleak market and a boom in ultra-budget portables, Apple is believed by some to be readying its own take on the netbook for the first half of 2009. — Analyst Ezra Gottheil from Technology Business Research …

Wireless turns iPod into a phone — A freeware application for the iPod Touch can turn the music player into a virtual mobile phone. — Truphone uses wi-fi technology in an iPod Touch to allow users to make calls to other iPod Touch owners and Google Talk's messaging service users.

Youtube's Desperation — Youtube has been messing with the magic quite a bit lately. Wide screen, high quality and the drive me crazy pre rolls to subscribe among many others. (BTW, watching the subscribe button scurrying around the screen was fun the first 300 times). But lets talk Youtube business.

Walmart.com offers “thousands” of Wiis from Monday — NEW YORK (Reuters) - Nintendo Co Ltd's Wii has emerged as one of the few hot products this holiday season, and Wal-Mart Stores Inc will offer “tens of thousands” of the hard-to-get video game consoles on its website starting on Monday.

Technology start-ups to be given £1bn fund — The government plans to launch a £1bn emergency venture capital fund in a bid to throw a lifeline to technology start-up firms. — The fund has won the backing of the new science and innovation minister Lord Drayson.

Google now hawking fully unlocked G1s to developers — It didn't take long before people started hacking away at the T-Mobile G1, the first phone to ship with Google's Android platform, and now it looks like Google wants to make it even easier. Starting today, Google is offering …

Online video sites HD quality comparison — After a lot of wait and speculation, since I had asked the Youtube founders back in January when Youtube would be in HD (through Robert Scoble fortunately reading my questions through his live Qik broadcast), Youtube finally has launched Youtube HD.

UK ISPs switch on mass Wikipedia censorship — The following notice has appeared on Wikipedia today when many UK users attempt to edit content: — “Wikipedia has been added to a Internet Watch Foundation UK website blacklist, and your Internet service provider has decided to block part of your access.

Google's Chrome Team Mulls Local File Restrictions — Google engineers are looking at extending Chrome's restrictions on local Web pages to further tighten the Web browser's security across a broader set of protocols. — Insider attacks tend to pose a greater computer security risk …

Survival is Competitive Differentiation — We've read a few articles lately claiming that survival is not a strategy. The arguments in Anand Rajaraman's article on GigaOM last month are sound, and if we understand them correctly include not prolonging a business that will never likely …

Video Just Got Better — Since we launched video last year, more than 45 million videos have been uploaded to Facebook with approximately 100,000 new videos added each day. Starting today, you'll be able to upload higher quality videos to Facebook and also embed your Facebook videos on other websites.